The government is planning to increase the allocations to the much publicized public-private-partnership projects to Tk 3,000 crore in the national budget for the coming fiscal, beginning July, though most of the projects worth Tk 2,000 crore in the outgoing fiscal remained unimplemented. Until March, when the third quarter of the current fiscal ended, most of the year’s PPP projects remained on papers, the PPP office found on review.The allocations would go back to the exchequer for absorption the coming fiscal’s budget, said officials. Since fiscal 2009-10, said officials, the government selected 44 projects for implementation under public-private partnership. On evaluation, they said, implementation of 23 of the projects would require investment of $14 billion.They said that the government found private sector partners to sign contracts for the implementation of seven PPP projects worth $ 1.3 billion.They said that floating tenders for 12 more PPP projects worth $ one billion were at the final stages.The government has just begun feasibility studies of nine other PPP projects, said officials. A senior PPP cell official in the finance ministry said he would expect that the implementation of some of the PPP projects would start in the coming fiscal. He said that the enactment of the PPP Act in September removed some of the hurdles on the way of implementation of the projects.While presenting the budget for fiscal 2008-09, finance minister AMA Muhith drew a rosy picture in Parliament assuring it that the public-private partnership would generate investments to the tune of Tk 1,96,000 crore in the five following years. Tk 2,500 crore he set aside for the PPP projects in the budget for fiscal 2008-09 had to be returned. The story was repeated in each subsequent fiscal as no private partners were found for the implementation. And in each fiscal, until 2014-15, Tk 3,000 crore set aside had to be returned as unutilized money, drawing severe criticism from economists.Policy Research Institute of Bangladesh executive director Ahsan H Manzur called the government’s failure to utilize the public-private partnership concept as ‘unfortunate’.He blamed bureaucratic handling for the repeated failures.He said that over three years of valuable time was wasted on taking a decision whether the PPP office would at the prime minister office or in the finance ministry. The government was also clueless for years that a law would be needed for providing the basis of implementation of the PPP projects.
